We help sellers across the country to grow their brand through technology driven optimization: Saahil Goel

In conversation with Saahil Goel, CEO and Co-Founder, Kraftly, who talks about how he is using AI and machine learning to provide better experience to the sellers.

Zarafshan Shiraz
Feature Writer

Kraftly, one of India’s leading seller tools platform for online product commerce, has tapped the homepreneurs and individual seller segment and provided them with better visibility and easy seller tool to set their shop online. In an exclusive with Zarafshan Shiraz, Saahil Goel, CEO and Co-Founder, Kraftly, reveals how with the help of AI and Machine Learning, the site is providing a better experience to sellers for them to sell the products online.

What makes Kraftly unique in its features from other e-commerce sites? We are India’s leading seller tools and enablement platform for e-commerce and are focused on empowering sellers and the brands that they have created. We aim to facilitate their digitization journey, providing tools that help them set up a complete internet-enabled business. From setting up an online store to dealing with order curation, shipping logistics, and customer engagement, Kraftly helps sellers across the country grow their brand through technology-driven optimization, unlike other e-commerce sites that merely offer basic platforming.

Kraftly is further unique in two aspects. The first is its commitment to making it as easy as possible for sellers to take their first steps into taking their existing or new business online. With easy shop creation, instant product listings and a free online webstore that bears their brand, no one does it as well or as profitably for sellers as Kraftly does. The second aspect deals with driving up the brand’s visibility and helping it promote itself digitally. The recent launch of the Kraftly Ads Network helps sellers simplify paid digital promotions and online campaign building by automating these brands’ advertisements on different channels like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Google using AI-powered algorithms. Brands can now grow their visibility, get more orders and increase their profits. To further sweeten the deal, Kraftly provides all these features to sellers at 0% commission.

Essentially, Kraftly – indirect contrast to the other platforms and e-commerce sites in our space – is focused on fostering the innovation and modernization of the Indian seller ecosystem. We are helping sellers build their own brand, market themselves digitally and automate their delivery and order fulfilment functions. This is what makes us unique – our reliance on cutting-edge technologies to transform these sellers businesses, brands, and profitability.

How is it helping the sellers to set up successful business? The problem for sellers in India today is that even though e-commerce is a growing industry with more and more customers relying on it every day, the benefits of the increased trade through digital channels is not being evenly distributed. Larger sellers and brands have captured large sections of the market and major e-commerce platforms are not overly concerned about getting new sellers onto their site. Sellers in India today are confused about whether they should set up accounts on big e-commerce platforms or should they open their own website or rather rely on selling socially. The direct answer to these, especially in retail, is that the best approach is a multi-pronged one. Unfortunately, these sellers are largely unaware of the variety of options or unable to cater to multiple fronts equally. When they try a multi-pronged approach, they lack the resources or time to cater to each approach adequately. If they try a single channel for the online migration of their business, they feel that they are losing out on other opportunities.

Kraftly is helping sellers set up successful businesses by providing them with the right set of seller tools to cut through the chaos and simplify the digital journey of their brand. Sellers who get onto Kraftly can set up their own webstore, a Kraftly store and a Facebook store simultaneously, with automated inventory management so that they can centrally and easily control all their digital storefronts from one powerful dashboard. This enables these businesses to reach a larger pool of potential customers with just one click, raising their visibility greatly. Further, we make it easier for them to grow their business with a consummate support system, giving them the best-in-class support and help them grow faster by taking 0% commission on orders gained through our system.

Finally, we help these businesses get the word out into the market about their products and services. There are various channels for digital promotions but the two most powerful and successful ones are Google and Facebook ads. Kraftly realised that sellers were having difficulty using these platforms due to their inherent complexity. We, therefore, developed the Kraftly Ads Network which automates the digital marketing for these sellers on Google, Facebook and Kraftly. KAN has the capacity to boost seller’s sales by up to 5 times and these orders come at 0% commission to these sellers.

What technological developments have you introduced in the business? We are using our extensive expertise to adapt the latest technological developments into easy-to-use and transformative tools for sellers. We rely heavily on our Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning expertise to help our sellers optimize their offerings and make more successful online businesses. By gathering data across our network of sellers, we are able to develop crucial insights that help our sellers tweak their processes to become more efficient and sell more. Our Kraftly Ads Network is also built on a Machine Learning platform which enables the automation of the digital promotions for our sellers. What this implies is that by relying on data which studies customer behaviour, ads on Google and Facebook created by KAN are better able to draw customers into purchasing the product, helping sellers make more sales and grow their customer base.

We also deploy these technologies into making order fulfilment for sellers substantially easier. Kraftly finds the optimal route for COD orders for these sellers and connects them to the best logistics companies to get the products in the hands of customers. The system also helps them correct faulty addresses and highlights potential delivery problems before they happen, helping to reduce the number of return to origin (RTO) that these sellers have to face.

How is Kraftly empowering sellers from tier 2 and 3 cities? Two of the biggest problems sellers from Tier 2 and 3 cities face is brand visibility into more lucrative markets and logistical hassles in fulfilling orders in tier 2 and 3 cities. Kraftly tackles both these problems.

As mentioned before, we enhance the visibility of these sellers in the digital domain, helping them reach markets they would have been unable to tap into in the real world. A Google KPMG study revealed that digitally-enabled small and medium businesses have a much larger geographical reach and are better empowered to cater to customers beyond city boundaries. Over and above bringing these businesses online, we also help them promote themselves digitally, helping them select which markets they want to promote themselves in. This is especially helpful for growing businesses from tier 2 and 3 cities, as these businesses often find themselves at a geographical disadvantage in terms of access to larger markets, as compared to their metro-based counterparts.

We also help in optimizing order fulfilment and reducing RTOs, which are a major hassle in delivering products to tier 2 and tier 3 city buyers. These locations and addresses are not as well mapped out as those in India’s metro cities, and there is a greater probability of products getting lost en route to their intended destination. Incorrect or inaccurate addresses, an inability to reach the seller for guidance, and a preponderance of COD orders from these locations make this an expensive problem for sellers. At Kraftly, we offer route optimization and logistics service provider access to our customer, which makes it easier, cheaper and more profitable for these tier 2 and 3 cities’ sellers to do business.

What are your expansion plans? We are driven by our desire to make these amazing tools we have developed become more accessible to the millions of sellers in India. We are currently looking to expand our seller-base substantially and are on-track to reach our target of 250,000 sellers by the end of FY 2018-19. This would mean that we would have a CAGR of nearly 85% in terms of sellers on-boarded from FY 2015-2016 to FY 2018-2019. Over and above increasing our seller-base, we have just become the first seller platform to get integrated with Facebook Shop. Going forward, we intend to develop more tools to enhance our sellers’ brands and business, either through optimizing other channels or addressing other aspects of their functioning that could help them grow faster and better.